Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless communication systems have desirable characteristics for high-bit-rate transmission in a radio environment. For example, by dividing the total bandwidth into many narrow subchannels, which are transmitted in parallel, the effects of multipath delay spread can be minimized. OFDM systems have been adopted or proposed for Digital Audio Broadcasting, Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting, wireless LANs, and high-speed cellular data.
One disadvantage of using OFDM techniques for wireless applications is the potentially large peak-to-average power ratio (PAP) characteristic of a multicarrier signal with a large number of subchannels. For example, a baseband OFDM signal with N subchannels has a PAP equal to the number of subchannels squared divided by the number of subchannels, i.e., PAP=N2/N=N. For N=256, the PAP=24 dB. When passed through a nonlinear device, such as a transmit power amplifier, the signal may suffer significant spectral spreading and in-band distortion.
Conventional solutions to reducing the PAP for OFDM systems include using a linear amplifier and using a non-linear amplifier while backing off the amplifier operating point. However, these approaches result in a significant power efficiency penalty.
Another attempt to reduce the PAP includes deliberately clipping the OFDM signal before amplification to improve the PAP at the expense of some performance degradation. Another technique uses nonlinear block coding, where the desired data sequence is embedded in a larger sequence and only a subset of all the possible sequences are used, specifically those with low peak powers. Using this approach, a 3 dB PAP can be achieved with a relatively small bandwidth penalty. However, to implement such a coding scheme, large look-up tables are required at the transmitter and the receiver, thereby limiting its usefulness to applications with a small number of subchannels. Progress has been made toward coding schemes that reduce the PAP and can be implemented in a systematic form with some error-correcting capabilities. Nevertheless, these methods are difficult to extend to systems with more than a few subchannels and the coding gains are relatively small for adequate levels of redundancy.
Additional techniques for improving the statistics of the PAP of an OFDM signal include selective mapping (SLM) and partial transmit sequence (PTS). In SLM, a predetermined number M of statistically independent sequences are generated from the same information and the sequence with the lowest PAP is chosen for transmission. However, this introduces additional complexity for providing improved PAP statistics for the OFDM signal. In addition, the receiver must have knowledge about the generation process of the transmitted OFDM signal in order to recover the information. The sequence information is sent as side information, resulting in some loss of efficiency.
It would, therefore, be desirable to provide an OFDM system having a reduced PAP with optimal efficiency.